Fifteen years ago, Retrovirology was amongst the first open-access journals to be established through Biomed Central, instigated by our late Founding Editor Dr. Kuan-Teh Jeang. Since then, in what seemed like a rather daring move to be paper-free, Retrovirology has witnessed the exponential growth of open access journals that have changed the landscape of scientific publishing and communications. As was pointed out by the staff editors in PLoS Biology [1], the infancy of open access journal was a very different time from our present day, which was before smartphones, prior to most of the digital social media platforms and at a time when we had only begun to learn about the completed DNA sequences from the Human Genome Project [1]. Dr. Kuan-Teh Jeang (known universally as Teh) was an accomplished virologist and chief of the molecular virology section of the Laboratory of Molecular Microbiology at the NIAID NIH intramural program. Teh was a prolific scientist who authored more than 300 publications before he left us at the tragically young age of 54. Through open access publishing, Teh saw an opportunity to create a platform for retrovirologists to publish their findings in a timely manner as well as actively disseminating these publications to the community. Many of us vividly remember the enthusiastic emails that Teh sent us regarding any news or hot-off the press publications from Retrovirology.